Quotes from John Irving

Escribió que la peor razón para que algo ocurriera en una novela era que hubiera ocurrido realmente. "¡Todo ha ocurrido realmente, alguna vez!", rabiaba. "La única razón para que algo ocurra es que es perfecto que ocurra en ese momento". -Dime cualquier cosa que te haya ocurrido a ti- dijo en cierta ocasión a una entrevistadora- y yo lo mejoraré. Puedo mostrar los detalles mejor que como ocurrieron.

Wat weten Amerikanen eigenlijk van moraal? Ze willen niet dat hun president een penis heeft, maar het doet hen niets als hun president stiekem hulp voor Nicaraguaanse rebellen organiseert nadat het Congres dat heeft verboden; ze willen niet dat hun president zijn vrouw bedriegt, maar het kan hen niets schelen als hun president het Congres bedondert - als hij liegt tegen het volk en de grondwet van het volk schendt.

I was thinking I had noticed a curious lack of either enthusiasm or bitterness in the account of the world by Theobald's sister. There was in her story the flatness one associates with a storyteller who is accepting of unhappy endings, as if her life and her companions had never been exotic to her—as if they had always been staging a ludicrous and doomed effort at reclassification.

There's a reason we're fiction writers, you know—real life sucks; make-believe is our business," I try to tell her.

Most dump kids are believers; maybe you have to believe in something when you see so many discarded things.

Old Lowji's nasty remark would haunt Farrokh forever: "Immigrants are immigrants all their lives!" Once someone makes such a negative pronouncement, you might refute it but you never forget it; some ideas are so vividly planted, they become visible objects, actual things.

In other parts of the world, they have double-bed sheets," wrote Wilbur Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud's. "Here in St. Cloud's we do without—we just do without.

But not even a drunk can sleep through Boellmann's Toccata—not even outside the church, apparently. Alice enjoyed acting out how the drunken down-and-out had presented himself.

It seemed to Alice that the drunk should have been struck dead for using such language in a church, but before God could take any action against the down-and-out, William resumed playing—with a vengeance.

You take every opportunity given you in this world, even if you have too many opportunities. One day the opportunities stop, you know?

This gets complicated, because I know that not all ghosts are dead. In certain cases, you can be a ghost and still be half-alive—only a significant part of you has died. I wonder how many of these half-alive ghosts are aware of what has died in them, and—dead or alive—if there are rules for ghosts.

I was four, and I sincerely believe that this is my first memory of life itself – as opposed to what I was told happened, as opposed to the pictures other people have painted for me.

What we believe as children forms us; what haunts us in our childhood and adolescence can make us do wayward things

Grief is contagious," Marion began again. "I didn't want you to catch my grief, Eddie. I really didn't want Ruth to catch it.

Adam, we can't make being safe the guiding principle of our lives. We have to be who we are—we can only do what we do, sweetie.

Do not forget the past; forgive the past.

We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love.

The World According to Bensenhaver," the book jacket flap said, "is about a man who is so fearful of bad things happening to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere of such tension that bad things are almost certain to occur. And they do.

It was a deus-ex-machina world!

Even before she started talking to Franny, I could see how desperately important this woman's private unhappiness was to her, and how—in her mind—the only credible reaction to the event of rape was hers. That someone else might have responded differently to a similar abuse only meant to her that the abuse couldn't possibly have been the same.

But she drew the line at television. It took no effort to watch—it was infinitely more beneficial to the soul, and to the intelligence, to read or to listen—and what she imagined there was to watch on TV appalled her; she had, of course, only read about it.

we don't enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire—we tend to think that if you don't know where you're going, you don't belong where you are. In Canada, we give directions more freely—to anywhere, to anyone who asks.

But that's the test, Ruthie. The test is, sometimes there's no place to pull over—sometimes you can't stop, and you have to find a way to keep going. You got it?

At first it had slashed up the little silk pockets of her purse. Then she found part of an old thermometer container that slipped over the head of the scalpel, capping it like a fountain pen. It was this cap she removed when the soldier moved into the seat beside her and stretched his arm along the armrest they were (absurdly) meant to share.